Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 51
women or to children; some animals required permission from an elder to eat;
some animals should not be eaten by members of this or that clan; and so on.
Aunger has data, then on 145 animals. When he analyzes those data and looks
at which animals have similar patterns of avoidance, the animals are the units
of analysis. But he also knows something about each of his 424 informants.
When he looks at differences in food taboos across people—like patterns of
food taboos in the four ethnic groups—then people are the units of analysis.
A Rule about Units of Analysis
Remember this rule: No matter what you are studying, always collect data
on the lowest level unit of analysis possible.
Collect data about individuals, for example, rather than about households.
If you are interested in issues of production and consumption (things that
make sense at the household level), you can always package your data about
individuals into data about households during analysis. But if you want to
examine the association between female income and child spacing and you
collect income data on households in the first place, then you are locked out.
You can always aggregate data collected on individuals, but you can never
disaggregate data collected on groups.
This rule applies whether you’re studying people or countries. If you are
studying relations among trading blocs in major world regions, then collect
trade data on countries and pairs of countries, not on regions of the world.
Sometimes, though, the smallest unit of analysis is a collective, like a
household or a region. For example, each person in a household consumes a
certain number of grams of protein per week. But you can’t just add up what
individuals consume and get the number of grams of protein that comes into
a household. Some grams are lost to waste, some to pets, some to fertilizer,
some to fuel. After you add up all the grams, you get a single number for the
household. If you are testing whether this number predicts the number of days
per year that people in the household are sick, then the household is your unit
of analysis.
The Ecological Fallacy
Once you select your unit of analysis, remember it as you go through data
analysis, or you’re likely to commit the dreaded ‘‘ecological fallacy.’’ This
fallacy (also known as the Nosnibor effect, after Robinson [1950], who
described it) comes from drawing conclusions about the wrong units of analysis—making
generalizations about people, for example, from data about
groups or places. For example, in 1930, 11% of foreign-born people in the